New Asteroid Mining Company May Solve World’s Economic Problems

Early on Wednesday morning, a group of billionaires and former NASA scientists will announce Planetary Resources, the first asteroid mining company in history. They claim they will “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity”.

The group of investors and scientists on board this enterprise is impressive:

Harnessing the resources of asteroids is not a crazy proposition, and the return of investment could be amazing. So much so that they are convinced they can “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. More importantly, this may solve many of our material needs as resources on Earth keep dwindling fast.

But is it doable? There are no details yet, but if they are going to invest millions of dollars on it, you can be sure it is doable and it will be profitable. They don’t have to travel to the asteroid belt to grab them. There are many passing near Earth that may be accessible. In fact, there are already plenty of plans on scientists and engineers’ drafting boards.

Needless to say, and despite the fact that it will probably take some years to achieve their goals, this is all extremely exciting. If they are successful, it will truly be a new dawn for humanity.

We’ll be covering the press conference live on Tuesday, April 24, at 10.30am PDT (3.30am Wednesday AEST).

I'll wait to hear the press conference, but it doesn't make sense to me. It costs millions of dollars to launch a rocket. It costs even more to bring one back. The thing about minerals is that they tend to be really heavy. How do you bring back enough minerals to make it profitable?

You don't need to go up and down, over and over again.. you just need to build a space station to ferry back and forth between.. perhaps even work otu a way to process the stuff up there and then when it's all refined, bring that back.

I don't think we're talking hundreds of years, decades definitely. They can either put push rockets on them and push 'em into earth orbit (or lunar) or they can work out there and just send back the goodies. Personally I'd sign up to be a rock jockey in a second..!

More likely they will use ion drives. Nuclear power plant in the engin make electricity. Mine material from the asteroid to be vaporised to be used as fuel. get a big enough reactor and it will be able to produce enough thrust to modify the orbit. Probably place it in orbit arround the moon (so that there is no conflict with satelites around the earth) mine it there. Materials can be used to make bases on the moon or sent back to earth.

If they re-invest the money they make into exploration then this could seriously be what kick starts some awesome stuff.

I can see a future where mining probes are maintained and launched from a permanent manned moon base. 10 probes go to 10 different asteroids, return payload to the moon and then make a single trip to earth.

Getting the equipment up will cost a lot. Getting the minerals back down would require them to carefully "drop" them from orbit. Shielding maybe required. Shields could be made of the asteroid its self. It just needs to "land" some where. Even the shield could be shaped like a glider.

What a load of complete nonsense! Add trillions to the global GDP? Sorry, but rockets and space doesn't involve magic, you can't ADD money and value into the system as a whole like that. All that mineral value will do is simply DE-value resources from elsewhere. So the rich mining centres in Australia, Africa and Asia will LOSE trillions and the US will gain.
And the sorts of resources that are "dwindling" are mainly fossil fuels, oil used for plastics... Most of the stuff you could mine for on asteroids are recyclable anyway so that's NOT a "dwindling" resource.
In fact it's the complete opposite because getting rockets UP into space directly involves the use of thousands of tonnes of non-renewable fossil fuels.

I love buck Rogers, star trek and all that as much as anyone, but the reasons given here are nothing but kiddy fantasy.

You have to think in the correct timeframes and they are not going to start mining asteroids next week. Mineral resources are finite and by the time this sort of thing is doable, we'll have shipped all our mineral wealth to China so they can sell it back to us as manufactured goods for 1000 times the price. Recycling is not 100% efficient, either.

And you do understand that rockets don't run on petrol, right? The Saturn V used kerosene but that was 60 years ago and things have moved on since then. Today they use things like hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide. OK, both of those require ammonia, and we tend to make ammonia from coal or natural gas, but it can be made by several other processes and is therefore not actually reliant on fossil fuels.

The only crisis we have in mineral resources is on stuff that's a bit less common like all those rare earths in China etc. And that's still abundant enough, just expensive. All that space mining would do is shift the wealth because they wouldn't be paying the Chinese for it anymore.

It is irrelevant weather the fuel is totally based on Fossil fuel or not, either way that resource is being completely consumed in a destructive fashion in order to bring back mineral resources for no other reason than to make production cheaper for the Americans. There's no real net gain except in your imagination.

Maybe in the far future established space mining infrastructure and technology development will make colonising our solar system cheaper, but that's the only benefit and it's entirely speculative. The rest is bull.

Wouldnt the mining companies stop ripping the resources from our planet and start ripping them from space if its cheaper?. thus leaving vast amounts of enviroment on earth free from the evil mining corps?.

cant bring an asteroid back with coal in it? maybe you can maybe not, who knows whats out there its SPAAAAAAACCCCEEEE!!!

If they are actually able to capture and return an asteroid to a geostationary orbit (ideally a Lagrange point), perhaps they could use it to anchor the fabled space elevator, which would then solve the economics problem of transporting goods to and from orbit. Which would provide other opportunities like being able to send items to orbit without big rockets, orbital construction facilities for ships, microgee industries. Basically a potential jumping off point for just about every sci-fi idea out there.
The future could be here a lot faster than you think.

A couple? Their range is only something like 800m. You'd need at lest 6 or possibly more positioned around the diameter every 500m or so on the sides of the elevator, so you have overlapping fields of fire and total coverage (obviously you don't bother at extreme altitudes)
The weight, power, and resupply required would make that sort of system a massive burden on the structure.

The strength of the structure required to avoid being shorn/torn apart by gravity and centripetal forces would mean a Plane would bounce off it like a fly off a concrete wall. The structure would have to have incredible tensile strength of 30 tonnes per square millimetre.

:D Love it.
I've been reading *a lot* of Peter F. Hamilton recently, and all his books feature asteroid mining to some (awesome) degree. Bump them into orbit, then hollow them out & live in them as you mine them, or drop them down into oceans & float them to refineries. SRSLY AWESOME